Short Communication on Fingerprint Image Enhancement and its Future Scope

Abstract

The fingerprint images are rarely of perfect quality, due to the reasons like variations in impression condition, skin condition, scanning devices or may be due to non-co-operative attitude of the subject. This degraded quality of image can result in a significant number of spurious minutiae being created and genuine minutiae being ignored. A vital step in studying the statistics of fingerprint minutiae is to reliably extract the minutiae feature from fingerprint images. Thus it is important to employ image enhancement techniques prior to minutiae extraction to obtain a good number of reliable estimates of minutiae locations. The main objective of fingerprint image enhancement is to improve the ridge characteristics of the image, as these ridges carry the information of characteristics features required for minutiae extraction. Ideally, in a well-defined fingerprint image, the ridges and valleys should alternate and in a locally constant direction. This regularity facilitates the detection of ridges and consequently allows minutiae to be precisely extracted from the thinned ridges. Thus, the corruption or noise has to be reduced through image enhancement techniques to get enhanced definition of ridges against valleys in the fingerprint images.